Maritime thriller a graphic, gripping debut

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This article was published 29/01/2022 (1379 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Divorced cop Cooper Harrison takes his teenaged son to a shooting competition in their small oceanside town — where all hell breaks loose. Shots are still echoing when the horrified Harrison sees blood seep from the hay bale to which his son’s target is attached.

Two victims — trussed up and hog-tied, stuffed into cavities carved from the hay bales, tortured for days, maybe still alive when they were put there.

It’s nothing this small town’s police force has ever seen before, so from the unidentified city two hours’ drive away comes veteran detective Kes Morris, bringing her outstanding reputation — and the requisite baggage of the troubles and secrets and pain that every fictional police sleuth must bear.

There’s no ID on the victims and nary a clue who would want them dead, a town befuddled and afraid of what moves among them.

My goodness, this is an extraordinary work.

Beneath Her Skin is a stunning debut novel for author C. S. Porter — whoever she, or he or they may be. The publisher does not identify Porter — gender not disclosed, age unknown — saying only that Porter is a solitary writer living near the Atlantic Ocean.

The narrative does not say where the book is set, but one may well surmise it’s a fishing village in Nova Scotia, and the city is Halifax. What aficionados of murder mysteries might call clues are the publisher’s Halifax address and the acknowledgement of the financial contribution of the province of Nova Scotia.

Don’t trouble yourself that maybe you don’t get all the answers about the 38-year-old Morris — why she likes painkillers, whom she tries to phone late at night from her dumpy motel room and why she’s the first choice for difficult investigations.

And be warned going in that some of what you’ll read is very difficult to read. Disgustingly so, even for this genre. Hauntingly so.

Nevertheless, this is so good.

It reads, as the best debut mysteries do, as though it’s just the latest in a long series. No need to explain what’s gone on before — no one goes through life explaining personal history on a daily basis, just go with it.

Whoever Porter is, the author understands people who grow up in a small town and who never leave. The cops in this small town know everybody — they’re maybe limited in their world experience and don’t have the time on mean streets that Morris has lived, but they’re all basically decent people, and enough time is spent on each character to draw them out as real people that the reader would probably like.

The bars where Morris eats her dinner (by herself) and maybe downs one pint too many each night have that smell and sound of every small-town Canadian bar — the ones that let tourists know they should have just kept on walking, but that if you’ve lived there long enough, you’re always welcome.

There’s the captain of a lobster boat so fleshed out that you can smell the salt air coming off the page whenever he appears.

But this isn’t an oceanside Mayberry. People are dying, butchered, suffering a great deal before they die. Who they are and why they died so horribly, that takes time to work out. As does who’s doing the killing, and why, and why in the killer’s shoes you might consider whether you had the hatred in you to do the same.

No more hints. Beneath Her Skin is utterly brilliant. It feels as though it’s much longer than 224 pages, and that’s a good thing.

Whoever you are, C.S., and whatever inside your head takes you to such dark places, go there again. And again. You’re good.

Retired Free Press reporter Nick Martin would like to know if a real bar exists that serves the giant scallops over pasta described herein, even if all the locals would suddenly go silent and glare at him if he walked into the saloon.